Halo World Championship 2022 posts dismal viewership numbers

Something needs to change.
Photo via HCS

The Halo World Championship that served as a conclusion to the 2022 season also served as the fitting end to a dominant year for the OpTic Gaming roster. The four-man squad of aPG, Lucid, TriPPPeY, and FormaL all claimed their first world title in Halo this past weekend after decimating the competition since the start of the summer.

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But as great as OpTic’s accomplishment was, the future of Halo esports is a bit concerning if you look at the viewership numbers for this past World Championship. The final tournament of the 2022 season didn’t even crack 2 million total hours watched and fell behind both HCS Anaheim and the HCS Kickoff Major in that category, according to Esports Charts

The peak viewership for the tournament came during the grand final, with 143,585 viewers. For context, the grand final of the Kickoff Major a year ago reached a peak viewership number of 267,279 viewers.

Against Halo‘s regional console shooter rival Call of Duty, the Halo World Championship fell short again. The CDL 2022 playoffs this past August achieved over 3.2 million hours watched and a peak viewership of 275,000 during its grand final, even with a few hours less of runtime while exclusively streaming on YouTube.

If you look at virtually any major esport with a year-ending world championship caliber event, that final tournament is almost always the viewership leader in hours watched and peak viewership for the year. That’s the case for CoD, League, VALORANT, Dota 2, Rocket League, R6 Siege, Apex Legends, and other titles from this past year.

Halo is essentially the only major esport that had its world championship event fail to be the main draw of viewers during its year. This event even already lost some shine to it when 343 pulled the rug out from under the players regarding the crowdfunded prize pool.

The second year of the HCS in the Halo Infinite era officially begins with the next Kickoff Major in Charlotte from Feb. 24 to 26.


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Author
Scott Robertson
VALORANT lead staff writer, also covering CS:GO, FPS games, other titles, and the wider esports industry. Watching and writing esports since 2014. Previously wrote for Dexerto, Upcomer, Splyce, and somehow MySpace. Jack of all games, master of none.